When their anxious rescue dog bolted into the woods, Daniel and Jake found him pawing at an unconscious elderly woman, barely clinging to life. The paramedics said she wouldn’t have survived another hour. But who was she, and why did their dog seem to know exactly where to find her?
We adopted our dog, Buddy, four months ago from a shelter in rural Pennsylvania. He was scrawny, nervous, with one ear that never stood up, and the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. The volunteer at the shelter, a tired-looking woman with graying hair, sighed when we stopped at his kennel.
“He’s been here the longest,” she said. “People overlook him because he’s older.”
That was all I needed to hear. My husband, Jake, and I signed the papers that day.
Buddy wasn’t perfect. He had nightmares that made him whimper in his sleep. He barked at thunder like it was coming to get him personally.
He refused to walk near men in baseball caps, which we never quite understood. But he loved us fiercely, in that desperate way rescue dogs do. Every night, he’d sleep by the door like he was guarding us from something only he could sense.
“What do you think he’s protecting us from?” I asked Jake one evening. “Maybe ghosts,” Jake said with a grin. “Or maybe just his own past.”
Last week, we decided to take him hiking on the old Ridgeway Trail.
It’s quiet there and it’s one of those places where sunlight filters like gold through the trees. The air smelled like pine and damp earth, and for the first time in weeks, I felt like I could actually breathe. We were about two miles in when Buddy stopped dead.
His ears perked up, his tail went stiff, and then he bolted off the path. “Buddy!” I shouted, my voice echoing through the trees. Jake and I chased after him, tripping over roots and pushing through low-hanging branches.
My lungs burned as we crashed through the underbrush. I kept imagining him running onto a road or disappearing into the thick woods forever. We found him about 50 yards away, pawing at something near a fallen tree.
It took me a second to understand what I was looking at. It was a woman. An elderly woman, lying on the ground, pale and still.
Her gray hair was matted with leaves, and her skin was cold to the touch. I immediately pressed my fingers against her neck, searching for a pulse. It was there, but faint.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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